Saturday, March 29, 2008

Among the important issues raised by the pregnancy of Oregonian Thomas Beatie is whether a female-to-male transgender person who becomes pregnant might be endangering the fetus, especially someone like Beatie, who has been taking testosterone for at least 10 years. There's very little research on the subject to date, and some experts are at odds about it. Any possible damage done by 10 years of testosterone would be irreversible, he said.

Jamie Lynn Spears amped up her own engagement rumors Tuesday by showing off a sparkly rock during a Kentwood, La., coffee run. Of course, if it is an engagement ring, she's wearing it on the wrong hand. But those Spears sisters always have done things...uh, a little differently.

Recipe

Pick 3 stories from Google News. Using only words that occur in the first 3 paragraphs of each story, make a poem with 3 stanzas, 3 lines each, no more than 60 characters per line. The 3-word title should use a word from each story.

Mechanical aids encouraged. Try one of the the text mixers here or here if you'd like to work with a block of language that's been randomized or run through an algorithm.

On the same newsday that your 3 stories were published, send your poem to 3by3by3blog (at) gmail (dot) com. Include links to your 3 stories.

3by3by3 is an ongoing experiment. All results are added to the data set.

3by3by3 was launched as a public service by Lance Newman on Tuesday, October 10, 2006, the birthday of the San Diego Union-Tribune -- 138 years of logrolling, pablum, and vigilante screeds.

Character Counter

Diners

About 20 people a day find their way here in one of 3 ways. They know or follow the site and check in for recent posts. They link in from a site like Silliman's blog or Selby's List or one of many poetry zines and blogs. They google a phrase like "draft game rules" or "spanking Britney" or "porn agency" or "american animals" or "monkey material." All are welcome, but the last group is especially well come. On April 15, 2011, the 500th poem was posted and the 20,000th visitor read it.